Mohamed Al Fayed’s brother Salah also abused Harrods staff, women say

One of Mohamed Al Fayed’s brothers also abused women working at Harrods department store, according to three ex-employees who made allegations to the BBC, including sexual assault and human trafficking.

The women allege that Salah Fayed abused them in London, the south of France and Monaco between 1989 and 1997. One woman believes she was raped by Salah after being drugged.

All three women also say they were sexually abused or raped by Mohamed Al Fayed, the company’s then chairman.

Harrods, which came under new ownership in 2010, said in a statement that the new claims highlight the “extent of abuse” by Al Fayed and “highlight serious allegations” against his brother.

Salah Fayed, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2010, was one of three Fayed brothers who bought the luxury Knightsbridge department store in 1985. Mohamed added the Arabic prefix ‘Al’ to his surname sometime in the 1970s.

One of the three women, Helen, has waived her right to anonymity. She was 23 and had been working in her ‘dream job’ in Harrods for almost two years when Mohamed Al Fayed raped her in a hotel room in Dubai.

Months later, when Mohamed offered her some personal assistant work with his younger brother, she saw it as an escape route – but instead she says she was drugged by Salah and believes she was then raped by him while unconscious .

“He (Mohamed Al Fayed) shared me with his brother,” she says.

Helen is speaking for the first time after feeling silenced for 35 years, partly because of a Harrods non-disclosure agreement she was told to sign.

“They stole a part of me,” she says. “It changed the course of my entire life.”

The BBC has also independently spoken to two other women who say they were abused by both Mohamed and Salah.

They say they were trafficked abroad and tricked by Salah into smoking crack cocaine.

“He tried to get me addicted to crack so he could do whatever he wanted to me,” one of the women told the BBC.

Warning: This story contains details of sexual violence

Like many women who have done that told the BBC they were being abused by Mohamed Al FayedHelen says she was spotted by him during one of his routine walks around the Harrods workplace.

During a business trip to Dubai and Abu Dhabi in February 1989, she was shocked to discover that she had been booked to travel alone with Al Fayed and stay in his hotel suite, while the rest of his entourage stayed in separate accommodation.

On the first night, Helen was in the bathroom getting ready for bed when, without warning, Mohamed Al Fayed appeared in the mirror behind her.

“It felt like something out of a horror movie,” says Helen. “I was in my nightgown and he grabbed my hand and started pulling me out of the bathroom. I really tried to stop him but I couldn’t.”

She says he took her to his room, pushed her onto the bed and climbed on top of her.

“He raped me that night,” she says.

Helen says she was terrified being so far from home and not being able to talk to anyone about what had happened.

Two months after the trip she was told she had to sign a non-disclosure agreement from Harrods – the BBC has seen this document. Helen says this, and fear of reprisals kept her from speaking out for over thirty years.

Over the following months, Helen began making plans to leave Harrods. “I didn’t want to see his face anymore,” she says.

So when Al Fayed asked her to do some archival work for his brother Salah at his Park Lane home, she saw it as a way out.

“I met Salah and he seemed very friendly. He didn’t look anything like his brother.”

After working with Salah for two days, Helen remembers him offering her a glass of champagne to thank her.

“Within a few sips I started to feel a little dizzy, but I can’t describe it as drunk. It was a really dizzy and weird feeling. I didn’t feel well.”

Salah started playing music and Helen felt that “it was definitely time to go, he was getting too gregarious”.

Helen says Salah pressured her to take ‘just one hit’ from a hookah containing crack cocaine. “This will make you feel better,” she remembers him telling her. “That’s the last thing I knew that whole night,” she says.

She remembers waking up, lying on a couch in a completely different room, with double vision and her whole body shaking. Salah was sitting at her feet with a glass of water and a tablet in her hand, looking “nervous and panicky”, she said.

When she stood up, she noticed that the button on her jeans was undone and her belt was missing.

Helen remembers feeling a sensation between her legs and discovering semen. “It wasn’t just in one place, it was in another place.”

She adds, “I knew then what had happened. I knew it.”

Helen says Salah Fayed then called his brother Mohamed in her presence to let him know she would not be working at Harrods that day. Their conversation was in Arabic, and Helen says all she could hear was “them laughing at each other.”

Still feeling the effects of the drugs, Helen said she needed help walking back to her own apartment. As Salah drove her home, he suggested they stop to visit a friend.

The first thing Salah’s friend said to her, she remembers, was: “Hi Helen, how are you this morning?”

She says she didn’t know the man and when she looked at Salah questioningly, she says he told her: “He saw you last night.”

Helen decided to leave. ‘I just needed to be alone for a while. When I closed the door, I could hear those two men laughing.”

Helen now believes that Salah’s friend also raped her that night while she was unconscious and is certain that she was raped vaginally and anally.

“That’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to say,” says Helen.

Shortly afterwards, Helen resigned from Harrods.

Two other women working at Harrods say they believe the way they were taken to Monaco and southern France to be abused by Salah would now be considered human trafficking because they were lured with misleading job offers and sexually exploited .

Rachael was 23 and working in Mohamed Al Fayed’s private office in 1994 when she received a call from Harrods’ HR team and was offered a job as Salah’s personal assistant.

When she started the job, Rachael said she didn’t get work as a personal assistant and instead felt like a “companion”, attending dinners and “getting to know him”.

One night in Monaco, Rachael says she woke up ‘petrified’ to see Salah in bed. She lay awake all night, frozen with fear, and in the morning he left.

During her time as his personal assistant, Rachael recalls being introduced to older men by Salah, who she says made her a ‘sexual proposition’. She now wonders, “Was I there to be shown around?”

She says Salah encouraged her to smoke ‘hubbly bubbles’ – a hookah pipe used to smoke flavored tobacco – but she later discovered it contained crack cocaine.

Rachael says she felt his goal was to get her addicted so it would be easier to abuse her.

She was told that if she didn’t like the role with Salah, she could return to Harrods. She went back, but Rachael says 18 months later she was lured to Mohamed Al Fayed’s home in Park Lane where he sexually assaulted her.

A third woman, who we call Rebecca, says she was also sexually assaulted by Mohamed Al Fayed in Park Lane. It was 1997, she was 19 years old and working at Harrods.

Later she was asked by him to go to Monaco to work as a personal assistant for his younger brother Salah, but upon her arrival she found that there was very little work to be done.

She remembers Salah talking to her brother Mohamed on the phone in Monaco, who she says asked: “Is my brother taking care of you?” He ended the conversation by telling her to “just have fun.”

She remembers experiencing a “very uncomfortable feeling” in her stomach at that moment. “It’s like the penny drops. The expectation is that you’re there for a job, and really you’re just there as a potential piece of meat.”

Rebecca says she was pressured into sitting in a hot tub with Salah in his Monaco apartment, where he sexually assaulted her.

She also told the BBC that he encouraged her to smoke what he said was “tree resin” from a homemade hookah. In reality it was crack cocaine.

Harrods said it “supports the courage of these women to come forward” and urged them to claim the company’s compensation scheme.

It said it hoped they would also look at “any appropriate avenue for them in their pursuit of justice”, including the police and the Fayed family and estate.

In her last days at Harrods, Helen remembers that a new girl started who seemed “as young and naive” as she had once been. As they finished a shift together outside the office, Helen said she confided in her and warned her about Mohamed Al Fayed.

Looking back, she says she is glad she did what she could to stop her from staying.

“I told her that he would try to have sex with her, that he would touch her and put pressure on her. I did tell her that I had been raped by him. She looked shocked, but I don’t know how that must.” whether she stayed or left.”

Before she left, Helen says she was given cash, which she thought at the time was a normal dismissal procedure. Now she thinks it was to keep her quiet.

She says what she thought would be her dream job ended up causing her lifelong trauma.

“It’s taken me 35 years to speak, that’s how scared I’ve been to speak,” she says. “I want to stand up for victims of abuse, both corporate and domestic, and let them know they can vote too.”

Additional reporting by Erica Gornall

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